THE CANNES FILE : Good Show for Independent Film Makers : Heroes of tight budgets

Imagine that you are looking at a satellite map of Europe with a circle drawn around the area known as the French Riviera.

Now, zoom in farther, to another area of Cannes, this one with a circle around a white spot along the beach. Hit the zoom button again-- Zzzwip! --and you see a large white tent with the sign “American Pavilion” over the door.

A peculiar noise rises, a drone that grows into a furious polyglotted babble. Something important is going on here as we cut to . . .

A dais with six film makers, their bodies back-lit by the sun reflecting off the Bay of Cannes, and surrounded by reporters, camera crews and admiring film buffs. The admiration is palpable.

In Hollywood, most of these guys would be sneered at by studio guards, but in Cannes, where film makers are viewed as heroes on tight budgets, they have spent this week in the center of the universe. They are:

* Spike Lee, the hard-charging, uncompromising young black film maker who has miraculously gotten two major studios to finance movies--”School Daze” by Columbia and “Do the Right Thing” by Universal--that they couldn’t possibly understand.

* James Jarmusch, a staunchly independent spirit whose last two movies--”Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down By Law”--barely earned back their minuscule costs, despite the raves of critics.

* Steven Soderbergh, a 26-year-old whose first film is one of the favorites to win the coveted Gold Palm Award here.

* Wayne Wang, a Chinese-American director with a genius for capturing moods of Chinese immigrants in the United States in ways that major studios don’t know how to market.

* Charles Lane, who started his first feature on March 1 this year and is here 10 weeks later for its world premiere.

* And Ed Feldman, a veteran (“I’m older than anybody in this room”) producer whose films include “Save the Tiger,” “Witness” and the current hot potato “Wired.”

There are other things going on in Cannes, as there are in the rest of the galaxy, but for the moment, nothing is more important than the subject on the table--the essence of independent film making.

The subject is particularly hot this year because the 42nd Cannes Film Festival is uniquely blessed with American independent films.

Jarmusch, a huge favorite here since his “Stranger Than Paradise” stole the Directors Fortnight Series four years ago, is in the main competition this year with “Mystery Train.”

Lee was also a “Cannes discovery,” for “She’s Gotta Have It,” a Fortnight hit in 1986.

To the major studios, Cannes is an episode of “Fantasy Island.” Nothing that happens here really happens . . . at least nothing that can be measured in any financial terms. The winner of the Gold Palm Award is about as exploitable commercially as the winner of the Pacoima Bake-Off.

There are different yardsticks in Cannes, at least where film makers are concerned, and what counts with these avid fans--the critics as well as movie goers--is purity of the spirit.

You can keep Steven Spielberg, or half of whatever he owns. The most envied person in Cannes may be Jarmusch, who has managed to make and get distributed four movies while maintaining ownership of the negatives.

Jarmusch broke that news during the independent film makers seminar at the American Pavilion Tuesday, unpretentiously making of himself the model of the complete independent. He writes his own scripts, directs them with total freedom and owns them forever.

The definition of an independent film maker has changed over the years and is still a little muddled. The traditional view is of a person making movies outside of the studio system. Most of the panelists here said it has to do with creative vision and control.

“Independent film making is trying to tell stories in different ways,” said Spike Lee. “It’s disheartening to me to see American independents doing things you can see on TV.”

Lee is an independent working within the system. He made “She’s Gotta Have It” on a budget of $175,000 and got it distributed outside the system. But his second film “School Daze,” was financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures. “Do the Right Thing,” a cinematic anatomy of a race riot, was made by Universal and will be released in the United States June 30.

Tuesday’s seminar didn’t offer many fresh insights into the status of independent film making. As Feldman said, independence is about power and the studios have most of that.

Creative control, Feldman said, is what everybody from the writer to the studio executives want and compromise is the way it’s divvied up.

Jarmusch didn’t buy that and set off the only spark of debate by saying that producers ought to either “trust the people they hire and keep their mouths shut, or direct films themselves.”

“When they think that because they used to own an underwear factory they know how to make a film, that gets me real angry,” Jarmusch said.

Feldman, who has never owned an underwear factory, took umbrage over the idea that he should stick his nose out of the creative process and said only when you’re spending your own money should you expect to have complete control over what you make.

Feldman, as he himself acknowledged, is anything but an independent film maker. “Wired” became an independent film because no major studio wanted to make it.

The producer’s commitment to Establishment thinking was evident in the one example he cited about his creative contributions to his directors’ films.

While making “Save the Tiger,” a film that won Jack Lemmon an Oscar, Feldman said he convinced director John Avildsen to drop a scene where Lemmon’s character solicits a prostitute on the way to work one morning.

“I said women are not going to remain sympathetic to this character if he has a hooker at 10 in the morning,” Feldman said.

He may have been right about the film’s audience, it was pointed out, but the decision to cut the scene was a commercial one, having nothing to do with the integrity of the character.

“To me, being an independent film maker means you have the ability to make the film you want to make without having somebody tell you how it should be made,” Jarmusch said, turning to Feldman. “Maybe you should consider being a producer-director.”

Most of the films that end up in the official programs at Cannes are independents. In most countries other than the United States, directors have creative control over their films by law, regardless of how they are financed. It is a condition of the Berne Treaty, written a century ago to protect the works of artists.

Creative control in the United States is a contractual matter that only the elite of the independents is able to negotiate. Soderbergh’s first film, “sex, lies and videotape” has turned him into an instant star in Cannes, but he said he had no contractual rights to the final form the movie took.

“The final cut belonged to (the producers),” he said. “But I was prepared to go public and have my name taken off the movie if they changed it. But it never came to that. I was left completely alone.”

What the independents’ seminar pointed out was that you are only as independent as the deal you can cut. In that sense, it’s no different from working within the studio system. The more money you need, the more help you’re going to get.

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Cannes is traditionally a hotbed of activity for another form of American independent--the specialty film distributor. In the past, they came here in force, scouted the films in competition and began bidding for U.S. rights to the ones that figure to go over with the art-house crowd at home.

The independents were elbowed out of the game by the major studios’ classics divisions for a while, but came back strong a few years ago when the studios closed most of those divisions.

Orion Classics, the only studio specialty division to succeed and survive, is still one of the leading buyers here. But the bidding wars have none of the frenzy of the past and the prices--even for the most popular films--don’t reach the same heights.

“If there’s a film that’s really hot, there will still be a lot of competition,” said Amir Malin, president of Cinecom. “But there is the realization on a part of American independents not to be crazy any more.”

Malin is one of the founders of Cinecom, the company that picked up “A Room With a View” a few years ago and made a killing playing it off slowly around the U.S. Malin acknowledged that that success got the small company thinking too big, and Cinecom made the same mistake that put many of its rivals out of business.

What Cinecom and others did, encouraged by the easy money available through video sales, was take “small” scripts that warranted budgets of maybe $1 million or $2 million, and ran the prices up by hiring stars considered necessary for video sales.

“We ended up in a no-man’s land,” Malin said. “There were all these films that didn’t work theatrically or on video.”

That fat video market has dried up for foreign and low-budget films. The video chains have settled into hit-oriented inventories and the independent distributors have had to rethink their strategies.

Some of the survivors have decided to go for the gold and make big-budget films that will be distributed by the majors.

Only a week ago Cinecom announced that it has signed Swedish director Lasse Halstrom (“My Life as a Dog”) to direct “Once Again,” a romantic drama starring Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter. The price tag: $16.5 million.